Monthly Archives: July, 2013

I suppose it’s about time I posted something here, if only to justify the existence of this blog, so far out on the fringe of obscurity, much like the object of its focus. Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last marked its first birthday on June 21, a few weeks before the arrival of the 76th anniversary of Amelia’s last flight, on July 2, 1937. Since nothing memorable happened on the “platinum” anniversary, when one might reasonably expect something of significance to occur, we shouldn’t be surprised when the 76th anniversary would pass quietly.

All wasn’t entirely calm on the media front, as Ric Gillespie of TIGHAR was promoting another of his bi-annual schemes to collect prodigious sums of money from the stupid for the ostensible purpose of returning to Nikumaroro and searching for Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan and their lost plane. Gillespie has done this 10 times already and found many curious “artifacts” among the island’s buried garbage that he’s brazenly attempted to connect to the lost flyers or the Electra, never successfully of course, because they were never on Nikumaroro.

No need to provide the details of Gillespie’s latest scheme here; it’s possibly the most absurd of all his ridiculous offerings to date, and would be hilarious if it wasn’t such an outrageous affront to all common sense and decency. Regardless, Gillespie need only utter his latest fantasy to Discovery News, which publishes his newest excuse to fundraise, and the monkeys and stenographers in the entire major media fall in line with their always-predictable press releases and breathless broadcasts, once again hyping a delusion as the Second Coming.

Many can attest to the fact that the American flyers never visited the atoll once known as Gardner Island, including Henry Maude and Eric Bevington of the British Colonial Service, who was there just 100 days after Earhart vanished. Ninety-odd days earlier, Lieutenant John Lambrecht and two other pilots from the USS Colorado, whose planes were launched by the battleship to search Gardner mere days after the flyers went missing, saw nothing amiss. The hundreds of Gilbertese settlers who lived there from 1940 until the early 1960s, as well as the dozens of U.S. Coast Guardsmen who manned the LORAN Station in 1944-’45, would say the same thing — no trace of the missing American pair was ever seen on the island.

Meanwhile the major media blackout ofAmelia Earhart: The Truth at Last, continues unceasingly. Good people such as Deanna Spignola, Michael Betteridge and Jessica Renshaw were willing to offer their support, stand up for the truth and have me on their radio shows and write about this on their blogs. Thanks to great support from Debbie Menon of Veterans News Now, my long commentary, “The truth in the Earhart ‘mystery’ is a sacred cow” reached No. 1 on that news site, with many thousands of reads (please see “Media” at www.EarhartTruth.com).

Otherwise, the entire lame-stream media vehemently opposes and ignores this book and its message; their longtime investment in perpetuating Gillespie’s falsehoods is obvious to any rational observer. If the publication of Truth at Lasthas proven anything, it’s that the Earhart cover-up is alive, well and more real today than ever. How else can one explain the media’s unbridled, never-ending enthusiasm for the so-called Nikumaroro “hypothesis,” which is nothing more than long-debunked, thirdhand, unmitigated crap, while completely ignoring Truth at Lastand its uncompromising presentation of the overwhelming eyewitness, witness and documentary evidence that places Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan and their Electra 10E on Saipan in the weeks and months following their loss?

Want more evidence? Hollywood director Rich Martini and associates recently spent months on Saipan vainly digging at the old Aslito Airfield in search of Amelia’s Electra, as well as interviewing aging Chamorros in search of new eyewitnesses to the prewar presence and deaths of Earhart and Noonan. Naturally, Martini’s activities were big news on Saipan, and were covered extensively in the two newspapers there, Marianas Varietyand Saipan Tribune. But one could search forever without finding a single media organization in America – not one newspaper, radio or TV station, or even a single blog – that contained a whisper of Martini’s Saipan excursion. Enough said for now. I continue my efforts, for whatever that’s worth.

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The Second Edition of “Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last,” is a large 7″ by 10″ paperback offering 370 pages at the same low retail price of $19.95, and significantly less at Amazon.com. The book adds two chapters, a new foreword, several new subsections, the most recent discoveries, rare photos and a near-total rewrite to the mountain of overwhelming witness testimony and documentation presented in the first edition of “Truth at Last. ”

Even as a child, Amelia had the look of someone destined for greatness. In this photo, she seems to be gazing at events far away in time and space. Who can fathom it?

This is a priceless portrait of our heroine at the tender age of 7. She seems to be peering into timelessness, as if she can actually see the amazing adventures that are in store for her — and us. Who can fathom it?

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Amelia at Spadina Military Hospital, Toronto, Canada, circa 1917-’18

While visiting Muriel at St. Margaret’s College in Toronto in 1917, Amelia encountered three Canadian soldiers who had lost a leg, and decided, on the spot, to join the war effort. She enrolled in the Voluntary Aid Detachment and was assigned to the Spadina Military Hospital. “Sister Amelia soon became a favorite among the wounded and discouraged men,” Muriel wrote.

Arrival at Londonderry, Ireland, May 21, 1932

Earhart had spent the last 15 hours tossed by dangerous storms over the North Atlantic, contending with failing machinery and sipping a can of tomato juice to calm her queasy stomach. That day—May 21, 1932—she planned to end her journey at Paris’ Le Bourget airfield, where exactly five years earlier Charles Lindbergh had completed the first solo transatlantic flight. When her Vega’s reserve fuel tank sprang a leak and flames began engulfing the exhaust manifold, however, Earhart wound up navigating to a Northern Ireland pasture. From that moment , Amelia Earhart’s star shined brightest, and her like has never been seen since.

Acclaim at Londonderry

Another great photo of Amelia, as she prepares to take off from Derry, Northren Ireland, and fly on to London, where worldwide fame awaited. After a flight lasting 14 hours, 56 minutes during which she contended with strong northerly winds, icy conditions and mechanical problems, Earhart landed in a pasture at Culmore, north of Derry, Northern Ireland. The landing was witnessed by Cecil King and T. Sawyer. When a farm hand asked, “Have you flown far?” Earhart replied, “From America.” The site now is the home of a small museum, the Amelia Earhart Centre.

Summer 1960: The Saipan Truth comes out

The headline story of the May 27, 1960 edition of the San Mateo Times was the first of several stories written by ace reporter Linwood Day that set the stage for Fred Goerner’s first visit to Saipan in mid-June 1960 and led Goerner’s 1966 bestseller, “The Search for Amelia Earhart.” Day worked closely by phone with Goerner, and on July 1, 1960, the Earhart frenzy reached its peak, with the Times announcing “Amelia Earhart Mystery Is Solved” in a 100-point banner headline accross its front page.

This story appeared in the San Mateo Times “Family Weekly” news magazine on July 3, 1960. The sensational account revealed details of her life as an 11-year-old on 1937 Saipan, but the true picture of what she actually saw that day remains in question. Was it a seaplane or a landplane in trouble that landed at Tanapag Harbor?

Fred Goerner with witness Manual Aldan, Saipan, 1960

Fred Goerner with witness Manuel Aldan on Saipan, June 1960. Aldan was a dentist whose practice was restricted to Japanese officers in 1937, and though he didn’t see the American fliers, he heard much about them from his patients. Aldan told Goerner that one officer identified the white woman as “Earharto!” (Courtesy San Francisco Library Special Collections.)

The only bestseller ever penned on the Earhart disappearance, “Search” sold over 400,000 copies and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for six months. In September 1966, Time magazine’s scathing review, titled “Sinister Conspiracy,” set the original tone for what has become several generations of media aversion to the truth about Amelia’s death on Saipan.

This story, which announced Thomas E. Devine’s Saipan gravesite claim, appeared in the San Mateo Times on July 16, 1960. Devine returned to Saipan in 1963 and located the gravesite shown to him by the Okinawan woman in August 1945, but did not share his find with Fred Goerner. Instead Devine planned to return to Saipan by himself, but he never again got the opportunity.

Thomas E. Devine, whose involvement with events surrounding the discovery and destruction of Amelia Earhart’s Electra 10E as a 28-year-old Army postal sergeant on Saipan in July 1944 shaped the rest of his life. Devine’s 1987 classic, “Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident,” is among the most important books about the Earhart disappearance ever penned.

Thomas E. Devine’s “Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident” (1987) is Devine’s first-person account of his eyewitness experiences on Saipan, where he saw Amelia Earhart’s Electra 10, NR 16020 on three occasions, the final time the plane was in flames. Devine’s book is among the most important ever penned in revealing the truth about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

On November 13, 1970, the Japan Times reported, for the first time, the shocking claims of Mrs. Michiko Sugita, who was told of Amelia Earhart’s execution on Saipan in 1937. Sugita, the eleven-year-old daughter of the civilian chief of police on Saipan in 1937, told the Japan Times in 1970 that Japanese military police shot Amelia Earhart as a spy there. Sugita, the first Japanese national to report Earhart’s presence on Saipan, corresponded for a time with Thomas E. Devine, but later went missing and his letters were returned, marked, “No such person, unknown.”

Mrs. Michiko Sugita, Japanese national, Earhart witness

Mrs. Michiko Sugita, whose account as told to the Japan Times in 1970 remains the only testimony from a Japanese national that attests to Amelia Earhart’s presence and death on Saipan following her July 2, 1937 disappearance. Sugitia corresponded with Thomas E. Devine for a few years in the mid-1970s before Devine’s letters were returned with the notation, “No such person. Return to sender.”

This story appeared at the top of page 1 in the July 13, 1937 edition of the Bethlehem (Pennsylvania)-Globe Times. “Vague and unconfirmed rumors that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan have been rescued by a Japanese fishing boat without a radio,” the report began, “and therefore unable to make any report, found no verification here today, but plunged Tokio [sic] into a fever of excitement.” The story was quickly squelched in Japan, and no follow-up was done. (Courtesy Woody Peard.)

Adm. Chester W. Nimitz: Fred Goerner’s most respected informant

Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, circa 1942, the last of the Navy’s 5-star admirals. In late March 1965, a week before his meeting with General Wallace M. Greene Jr. at Marine Corps Headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, Nimitz called Goerner in San Francisco. “Now that you’re going to Washington, Fred, I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese,” Goerner claimed Nimitz told him. The admiral’s revelation appeared to be a monumental breakthrough for the determined newsman, and is known even to many casual observers of the Earhart matter. “After five years of effort, the former commander of U.S. Naval Forces in the Pacific was telling me it had not been wasted,” Goerner wrote.

Marshall Islands 50th Anniversary Commemorative Stamps, 1987

The independent Republic of the Marshalls Islands issued these four postage stamps to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Amelia Earhart’s landing at Mili Atoll and pickup by the Japanese survey ship Koshu in July 1937. To the Marshallese people, the Earhart disappearance is no mystery or rumor, but a stone cold fact.